Project description
Circular economy for the car industry
Car electronics represent one of the most valuable sources of critical raw materials (CRMs). However, the car industry has little involvement in CRM recovery from end-of-life vehicles (ELVs). A variety of barriers to implementing circular economy practices include regulations, market, technological, cultural, societal, and even gender factors. What is more, despite the attempt to transition to sustainable mobility, the automotive sector still depends heavily on natural resources to produce new cars. The EU-funded TREASURE project will develop a scenario analysis and simulation tool to assess the positive and negative implications of circular economy practices and principles in car manufacturing to facilitate the adoption of CRM recovery and circular economy in this sector.
Objective
Car electronics is one of the most valuable source of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) in cars. What it sounds so strange is the lack of interest of car manufacturers (and the whole automotive sector in general) towards the recovery of these valuable components from End-of-Life Vehicles (ELVs). Maybe, the complex set of barriers (e.g. regulatory, governance-based, market, technological, cultural, societal, gender, etc.) companies must cope with when implementing Circular Economy (CE) are making very difficult its adoption, by limiting potential benefits. All these data show as, even if car manufacturers are investing big capitals trying to shift their business towards more sustainable mobility concepts, the sectorial transition towards CE seems to be far from its completion. Especially at End-of-Life (EoL) phase, there are still many issues to be solved in order to functionally recover materials from cars (e.g. reuse recovered materials for the same purpose they were exploited originally) and the dependence from natural resources when producing new cars (even if electric/hybrid/fuel cell -powered) is still too high. This mandatory systemic transformation requires to all companies/sectors to redefine products lifecycles since the beginning, by considering CE already before to design them. To this aim, the TREASURE project wants to develop a scenario analysis simulation tool able to quantify positive and negative implications of CE, by leading the European automotive supply chain towards its full transition to CE.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
20133 Milano
Italy